Hello!! I am Jose A Gómez, “The Analyst” for this week… it was such an experience! I really enjoyed performing this role, because I had the opportunity to show you my inner reflection about this fruitful week.

THE ENTIRE GROUP HAS BEEN WORKING IN A SMOOTH WAY: everything was coordinated. The group has a common intention to work as assertively as possible, due to the fact that the lack of time is something that matters. By contrast, the week had a good topic in which every one of us had a point of view, but with a general agreement. We all hate how textbooks are used by the government, editorials, and old-fashioned teachers, thus, the discussion during the week was really interesting to us. We have been learning from stories and experiences each of us have had before and have now with books. Moreover, we can use this shared experiences to understand the opinions of any component of the group, which are valuable tools to take into account as future teachers. This environment in which the group has been working was the ideal for every task. I do not want to sound so enthusiastic because there are things to fix and mistakes from where we might learn. However, this week was anything but dull.

THE WHATSAPP DISCUSSION. It helps us to keep in contact, reach agreements and make some discussion, but that means we have to stay all day and all week look at it. We do not have a real disconnection, we do not have time to cut from University field due to WhatsApp, there isn’t a limit of hours to chat, no rules, no deadlines regarding Whatsapp message. Thus, we cannot disconnect from the week’s task due to 8 people’s ideas, opinions and intentions. I would change that, setting a time for keeping contact through Whatsapp. Do not get me wrong, I am not telling here that Whatsapp is the devil, what I mean by telling that is that I would set a small rule which controls this times-in or times-out could be beneficial for us.

Now I want to describe you what we have learnt this week and my own ideas about "The Dark Side of Textbooks", and some relations with other subjects of the degree.

Thursday, March 17

Hi guys! I'm Edu Gálvez and this week I'm the 'translator' of the group. You can see here the five most important terms that I have chosen as to the topic of this week: "the dark side of textbooks".

·INFOGRAPHIC → As
its name indicates, it makes reference to information, data or
knowledge which is represented in a graphic. It has been developed in
recent years to be adapted to mass media. All people know what is a
circle chart, and it is a clear example of infographic. I have to to
say that I have chosen this term because, at the beginning of the week, we thought
in “infographic” for completing the task, but finally we chose
the comic as way of work.

·BROKEN MARKET → According to
the topic of this week, the broken marked is those that happen in the
textbook's market when:

1. Students (final consumers) do not
choose the product.

2. The product is chosen by a
educational institution.

3. The product is paid by parents of
students.

Mainly, as result of that, textbooks
have a price unsustainable and their quality is bad.

·E-TEXTBOOK → Basically,
it is an electronic textbook, which represents an useful way for
getting the content that children need for studying without spending
a high amount of money. E-textbook is not an innovation, but recently
it has experienced an increase thanks to digital gadgets.

·OPEN TEXTBOOK → It
is a textbook with an open copyright license and available online for
everybody who need it. Everyone can get an open textbooks by
different ways: printed, online or audio format. It can be purchased
at litlle or no cost, so it is another right way for saving money, as
e-textbooks.

·EDUCATIONAL POLICY
→ Redarging to “the dark side of textbooks” (topic of this
week), I can say that actually there is a educational policy based in
the following net of relationships:

1. High
states of the Policy in Education

2. Editorials,
schools and teachers

3. Children
and their relatives

As
result of the educational policy that we are living nowadays, it
exists the “broken market” that I have mentioned before.

The topic of this week was "The Dark Side of Textbooks". At first I thought that this topic was very easy to prepare for presenting, but I didn't know exactly how the presentation was going to be so I felt I little bit nervous.

In the case of our group we decided to create a comic to criticize textbooks. Creating the comic was a great and funny experience but also time consuming, in addition I had to think how to relate the contents that we wanted to criticize about textbooks and the history that we created in our comic.

The day of presenting nervous I was very nervous, because as I said it, I didn't exactly what I had to do, but once the lesson started I felt more comfortable. My job consisted in expalining my comic to a group formed by members of others group.
After that working together we had to identify the mistakes of the comic and the contents that could be included, in order to improve future projects.
Later we created a question that we would include in an oral exam about "The dark Side of Textbooks". Once we had finished our question, I presented in front of the class the comic and also the question that we had created.

From my own point of view it's been great working with other people not from my group to have other perspective about our comic, I really like this experience.

Hi everyone!
Pablo here, journalist of FH this week. Here you can see how this week went for the Friskies.

14 - March - Monday.

The first day, as always, the teacher explained us the task we had to do. This week was about "The dark side of textbooks". For this task we had to do a comic or an info-graphic explaining why the textbook is nowadays worse than other instruments. We decided to make a comic, because we thought it could be more interesting and less monotonous than an info-graphic. Also we had some good ideas for the comic, that's why at the end we decided to go with it.
Here you can see a photo of us thinking in what we can do for the comic and choosing the best way to do it.

15 - March - Tuesday.
The second day we went to class with fresh ideas of the comic, so after classes we went to the library to start doing the comic. First we all started saying what we thought about last day. After all the ideas were said we decided how the comic was going to be as you can see here.

After that we divided the work between the group and started to work in there. First we thought that it was going to be difficult because we didn't had time to see how the comic maker worked, but at the end it was much easier than we expected so we finished most of the work in that meeting.
Here you can see us working that day.

16 - March - Wednesday.
Finally in the presentation day we had everything ready to be shown. But the presentation of this week was quite different, because we had to stay in other group, analyze the star of the group we get assigned and between this new group create a question about the topic that could appear in the oral exam.
Here you can see some photos of this day.

Also this week I commented on The Chalkies blog and on this web page about other method instead of textbooks..

This week it was my turn to be facilitator and I was so
lucky to have such a topic. I know from my own experience how teaching with
textbooks is or teaching with other kind of resources because I am working as a
teacher in the afternoons (academies, private lessons and extracurricular
classes), and I can notice the big difference between working as a support’s
teacher with textbooks and working as a real teacher on my own English classes.

Textbooks are often boring, contents are not really practical
or useful in the real world. Children have to write and repeat the same
kind of exercises again and again and most times the vocabulary is
so basic, at least, in the case of English (in my opinion).

For these reasons I was more than happy to work in the “dark
side of the books” and then, reading and looking into it I discovered more
things to take into account such as the subjectivity of textbooks, the
economic interests of publishers and governments, the church behind a few TB publishers and so on… (Some of them which I already knew, others that I
didn’t).

The work’s structure during the week was the following:

Monday

The process of work was first of all choosing the platform we thought would fit best for our presentation (in our case, the comic), look
the possibilities of the platform, read all the information and bring some
ideas for the storyboard on Tuesday.

Tuesday

We shared all the ideas and thought about the contents we wanted
to show. We worked on the script and the number of sketches to carry out. Once we agreed, we distributed the work and set the deadline for that
evening. When each one did their work, we joined the scripts and fixed
mistakes. Then we prepared the speech for the presentation.

Wednesday

We printed and laminated early in the morning and we were
ready for the presentation. Fran was great in his performance and I think we
came out with a good job.

Thursday

We worked on our roles and wrote our experiences.

To conclude, I can say this subject is not the typical one. We have to work a lot by ourselves: search information on the internet, look for tools and ways
to find the best things for our projects. In my opinion, it’s an intelligent an
original way to teach. Maybe, it wouldn’t be possible for all the subjects
(because of the contents or the lack of time), but undoubtedly, it’s a
great way to focus this subject and the learning process. We are working here
just for 5 weeks and I have the feeling I know much more than before and I feel
more comfortable working with media every week. Also working in groups is not
always easy, but sometimes there is good synchrony in the team and we have the insight that collaboration is worthy!